


Odinson Family Dinner

by eternaleponine



Series: Ghosts That We Knew [18]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Deleted Scene, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 13:04:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1551470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternaleponine/pseuds/eternaleponine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exactly what it says on the tin.  Happens in the middle of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/951779/chapters/2750563">Chapter 37</a> of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/951779/chapters/1861493">Time For A Sign</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Odinson Family Dinner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jacedesbff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacedesbff/gifts).



"Rise and shine, little brother!" 

Loki groaned and pulled his blankets over his head, but Thor was having none of it. Surprise, surprise. He yanked them so hard it nearly rolled Loki out of bed, and he had to scramble to keep from tumbling to the floor. He grabbed his pillow and launched it in the direction of Thor's head.

Thor laughed and tossed it back, flopping down on the bed and sprawling, heedless of the fact that he was laying on Loki's legs. "It's almost noon," he said. "You can't sleep the whole day away!"

"I can try," Loki grumbled. He wasn't hungover, but he felt like he was. Days with too little sleep and too much stress, and a party last night where there hadn't been drinking (or if there had he hadn't known about it, because he wasn't going to jeopardize his future in the drama club by anyone getting in trouble for underage drinking at _his_ cast party). He'd planned to sleep through as much of the day as possible, waking up only to eat and head to the school for call.

"Oh come on," Thor said, nudging him. "I drove all morning to get here. You can't ignore me." 

"I can try," he repeated. "Come on, Thor. I need to rest."

"You need to get up and eat, shower, face the day. If you sleep too much, you'll just feel more tired."

Loki didn't understand the logic (he doubted there was any) but he also knew that his brother wasn't going to give up, so he forced himself to sit up. "I can't do any of that while you're laying on me," he pointed out, shoving his brother's shoulder. "Move." 

"Make me," Thor said, teasing because he thought he was funny, he thought that Loki liked it, though that it was just the sort of thing that brothers did, but they weren't brothers, but of course the big dumb blonde couldn't get it through his thick skull.

"I could," Loki said, "but I think we'll both be better off if I don't." Because now that he was awake, his bladder was letting him know that he'd done perhaps a little too good of a job rehydrating after last night's show. "Move."

He was surprised when Thor actually did it without any further argument. He got up and padded to the bathroom, grabbing his robe from the back of his door on his way out. He didn't emerge until he'd showered, staying under the water for longer than was probably necessary, but he wasn't ready to face the rest of his family yet. Maybe if he waited long enough his parents would get caught up with welcoming home the Golden Child and he could just disappear into his room and be forgotten until it was time to leave.

It worked, mostly, although Thor kept popping his head in, trying to draw him out. It was like dealing with a overexcited puppy more than a person, and although Loki was sure his brother had the best of intentions, he found it intensely irritating, and finally he just shut and locked his door against further intrusions, and didn't leave again until dinner time.

At least his mother had remembered that he had to eat early, because if he had a big meal too close to the show he might end up feeling sick. She'd also made sure there wasn't any dairy involved, which might gunk up his throat and make it hard to sing. 

He sat down at his usual place across from Thor, with his father on his right and his mother on his left. It was probably subconscious on his father's part, that Thor was also on his right, but that's the way it had always been, and when he'd tried to take his brother's seat once after he'd gone to school, just to see what would happen, his father had given him such a look that he'd gotten up and moved back to his own seat before he even really knew what he was doing.

"So how is school?" their father asked. "How are classes?"

"Good. We just finished midterms."

"How did you do?"

"Pretty good," Thor said, then looked at Loki. "So how's the show? As crazy as last year?"

"It's fine," Loki said. "It got a little—"

"What do you mean by 'pretty good'?" their father interrupted. "Pretty good as in a B, or pretty good as in you're trying to cover up the fact that you slacked off and now you're going to have to scramble for the rest of the semester to bring them up so you don't spend the next three years trying to recover your GPA from your freshman year?"

"Pretty good as in mostly B's, and one C, but we're already doing a project that's going to bring that up," Thor said. "I'm not worried." He turned back to Loki, but before he could say anything, their father interrupted again.

"Well, I'm glad that you're not worried," his voice dripped with sarcasm, and was it any wonder where Loki had gotten it? As much as he tried to believe that there was nothing of his parents – no, _not_ his parents – in him, he knew it wasn't true. "Why should you be? It's only your future on the line."

"I'm not worried because I know that I can bring it up before the end of the semester," Thor said. "I've talked to my professor and I'm working with the teaching assistant for some extra tutoring, and it'll be fine." 

Loki ought to be enjoying watching Thor squirm more than he actually was. He was used to his father finding fault with him, but his brother – no, _not_ his brother, he had to unlearn all of the... _brainwashing_ they'd done to him over the years – was the Golden Boy, the Chosen One, the one who could Do No Wrong, and now that their father had found out that he was fallible, that he wasn't always perfect, he should be reveling in it.

The silence stretched, and finally Loki said, "It took a while for things to come together. Longer than last year. Half of the cast got sick near the end of rehearsals, so that was a bit of a nightmare, but except for a few coughs here and there, we've mostly recovered. _I_ didn't get sick," he added. 

"That's good," Thor said, a bit more subdued now. "How was opening night?"

"It went well," Loki said. "We were a little concerned because the show for the eighth graders didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked, and we thought for sure that Pepper was going to have a coronary, but it all came together."

"It was wonderful," their mother chimed in. "If anything went wrong, you all covered it well, because I didn't notice a thing."

Loki wasn't sure if she was being charitable or honest, but he was pleased nonetheless. 

"What did you think?" Thor asked their – _his_ \- father. "Did you enjoy it?"

"I haven't been," he said. "I already had a commitment for Thursday night, and last night." 

Thor looked at him, blinked, frowned slightly. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Loki kicked him under the table, and when Thor looked over, he shook his head. He didn't want his brother asking what kind of commitment he had, why he couldn't have rearranged things to be able to go see opening night of his son's play. Loki already knew why, and he didn't want to hear it out loud. Even though the man wouldn't say it, he hadn't bothered to try to change his plans (even though he'd known months in advance, from the time the cast list went up, really, when the show would be) was because he just didn't care. He'd been there on opening night for _Camelot_ , of course, because Thor was in it. But Loki... Loki wasn't his son, and he wasn't worth the bother.

"But you're coming tonight," Thor said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," their father said. "I'm coming tonight."

"Could you at least _try_ to sound like it's not worse than being stuck on a conference call for two hours?" Loki asked, the words acid. He hadn't meant to say anything; he'd told himself over and over again that he didn't care, that his father was too uncultured to appreciate Theatre, all kinds of things, that he wasn't his father anyway so it didn't matter, but he hadn't quite managed to convince himself.

"Loki," their mother said gently, reaching out to rest her hand on his arm, but he pulled away. 

"What? Too much truth at the dinner table?" He stabbed his fork into his green beans. "I know that telling the truth isn't really a habit of yours, but—"

"That's enough," she said, quiet but firm. "Don't ruin the day for yourself."

_It's too late,_ he thought. _And I didn't ruin it for myself. It's_ his _fault, not mine._ But he didn't even really know which him he was blaming – Thor or their father. 

Both. Neither. 

Maybe it was his own fault after all for being born.

"I wanted to be here for opening night," Thor said, "but I had a test yesterday morning. I even tried to talk to my professor to see if I could take it early, but she said no. Apparently school musicals don't count as family emergencies." He flashed a somewhat sheepish smile at Loki. "Sorry, little brother."

"It doesn't matter," Loki said. "You didn't have to come at all."

Thor rolled his eyes. "Of course I did. I wasn't going to miss this."

Loki wasn't sure how to respond to that. Part of him wanted to demand to know why it mattered, why Thor cared, but he already knew the answer that he would give: 'Because you're my brother.' Because that was how it was in Thor's head, and it didn't seem to make any difference to him that Loki had been adopted, that they didn't have a drop of blood in common, that somewhere out there in the world Loki might have other brothers and sisters, a mother and father who had decided they didn't want him so they gave him up, thinking he would be better off somewhere else, with someone else.

But then, Thor had always known. He had to have. Even _he_ wasn't that dumb, that he wouldn't have realized that having a brother just turn up on the doorstep one day (more or less) wasn't normal, that usually there was a whole period of preparation and increasing girth on the part of the mother before a new sibling arrived.

Except maybe he'd been too young and _didn't_ know that at all.

Still, he clung to the idea that because they'd been raised together, that somehow gave them some kind of connection, some kind of bond. Their mother seemed to be believe it as well, but Loki was fairly sure that even if he had managed to delude himself for a while, their father - _Thor's_ father – had given up on that idea and was starting to realize that no, really, this dark boy who looked like none of them, really was a wolf among sheep and he'd shed his sheep's clothing and it was glaringly obvious now that he didn't belong.

"I would have come after my test to see the show last night," Thor added, "but they told me that you were having a party and I didn't want to get in the way of that." 

Loki's eyes narrowed, his forehead furrowing. "What do you mean, you didn't want to get in the way?"

"It was your party," Thor said. "I didn't want to draw attention away from that."

Oh. "Of course," Loki said. "Because your mere presence would have completely overwhelmed everyone." He sniffed. "Well, thank you ever so much for that, except the party is _tonight_."

Thor's shoulder slumped slightly, and for a second Loki almost felt bad. His brother really had thought that he was doing him a favor, then. He'd actually thought that if he'd turned up, everything would have been all about him again, as usual, and Loki would have been left in his shadow again.

But then... he wasn't really wrong, was he? That's likely exactly what would have happened, and even if Loki hadn't been a perfect host last night, he'd at least made an effort. If his brother had turned up...

He nudged his brother's foot under the table, and Thor looked at him. Loki shrugged, just one shoulder lifting and falling, a silent apology of sorts, the best that he could manage. It wasn't as if his brother intentionally left such big shoes to fill.

Thor smiled, understanding the gesture. He had years of practice; Loki had never really been very good at saying what he meant, especially when it was something that he'd rather not be saying. Having to admit he was wrong usually came wrapped in layers of sarcasm and feigned disinterest.

The rest of the meal was relatively quiet. Even Thor didn't put much effort into keeping the conversation going. Loki suspected he didn't want to draw his father's attention to anything else that he might perceive as a shortcoming and start another round of verbal sparring.

_Welcome to my world, big brother,_ he thought. _Welcome to my world._


End file.
